Odilon Redon (1840–1916) was a French Symbolist painter and printmaker whose art exists in a category largely its own — dream-states populated by floating eyes, hybrid botanical creatures, figures dissolving into color, and a chromatic intensity in his later pastels and oils that still stops viewers cold. For the first two decades of his career he worked almost exclusively in black — charcoal drawings and lithographs he called "my Noirs" — before abandoning the monochrome world in the 1890s for an explosion of pastels that rank among the most joyously colored works in French art. His influences were literary as much as visual: Baudelaire, Poe, and Flaubert provided the atmosphere; the microscope and the natural sciences provided imagery he found as strange and beautiful as any mythology. Proust, Huysmans, and the Surrealists all claimed him as a precursor, but Redon resists any single lineage — he remains, as he always was, singular.